9 Mobile App Testing Trends to Look For in 2022

It’s that time of year when we turn our attention to what lies ahead in the new year and beyond. For software development teams, it helps to understand the latest trends in technology, user behavior, and the broader market, as well as how to incorporate them into your mobile app development and testing strategies. This blog post discusses the mobile application testing trends for 2022 that software development teams need to know.

The global mobile application market is red-hot, with revenue expected to reach $613 billion by 2025, almost twice the market’s worth in 2020. As an industry, mobile games make up more than 60% of that revenue. This explosive growth will yield plenty of opportunities for software development, operations, and quality assurance (QA) teams alike.

But customer demands are also growing: they expect their apps to deliver a great user experience, perform flawlessly, and keep their account secure. With 54.8 percent of global website traffic coming from mobile devices and 89.2 percent of device time spent within mobile apps, there’s simply no room for weakness in your software development process. The better your app’s user experience, the more your user base—and your business revenue—will grow.

Technologies like 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) are transforming the software industry and will see increased adoption in 2022. How should mobile app testing strategies evolve to keep up with these changes? We forecast what lies ahead for mobile app testing in 2022 below.

DevOps will continue to be the preferred approach to software development in 2022, but it is also evolving. The promises and benefits of DevOps—increased speed, efficiency, risk mitigation, and continuous feedback loops—will help software teams meet the demands of both a fast-paced market and the modern consumer without sacrificing quality. To ensure DevOps can operate at scale, the need for signal-driven quality, or quality assurance processes throughout the application SDLC, is increasing, and will get emphasized with respect to mobile app testing as well. This is good news for mobile app testers, whose role is being viewed more and more as a true risk mitigation function rather than cost-generating overhead. By incorporating signal-driven quality into your DevOps workflows, you will add real value for both your company and your users.

Poor test quality remains a challenge for many organizations that have implemented continuous testing throughout the SDLC. This leads to bottlenecks while teams wait for test execution to finish, or for false positives and other failures to be analyzed. Fortunately, advances in AI and ML technology can enhance both the quality and speed of your automated testing strategies. Test failure analysis is now possible with ML algorithms that can analyze test data and provide aggregated, intelligent insights to help testers diagnose why certain tests fail. On the user experience testing side, AI bots can mimic human interactions with your app and report bugs or errors in the user interface. In the space of mobile games testing, the use of machine learning agents to simulate game play, and utilizing third-party tooling to collect and analyze the success and failures of the test run will rise.

When looking specifically at mobile games, companies often find it difficult to get a holistic view of game quality as it is being developed and play tested. While traditional testing allows teams to identify programming errors, it doesn’t provide for the inclusion of user feedback, needed to assess quality on a whole. It turns out, the majority of issues game developers and QA address are related to design, gameplay, movement, animation, and AI.

A number of game devs are already incorporating user feedback into their testing strategy to answer questions like “What aspects of my game are people reacting to?” or “Is there an aspect of my game that is getting a lot of negative (or positive) feedback?”. This type of qualitative testing will continue to improve and mature, helping game devs create better, and more engaging experiences. 

Cloud-based testing continues to be the test method of choice. As software organizations look to increase the coverage of their mobile app testing strategy by including both automated and manual tests, cloud-based testing is still the most efficient and cost-effective way to test your mobile app across various platforms and devices, without having to maintain a large fleet of on-premise hardware or virtual machines. Mobile app testing strategy that leverages the cloud will be easier to implement, maintain, and scale.

Cyberattacks are hitting businesses of every size and sector at an alarmingly increasing rate. Not only is your business at risk, but so is your users’ personal information. The frequency of custom malware, bot attacks, and post-login fraud is predicted to rise in 2022. Staying ahead of evolving attack vectors will require security features to be built into every stage of the user experience (think biometric security, multi-factor authentication).

Low-code automated testing has become a popular option for mobile app testing because it enables non-technical testers to design and automate their own test suites. By allowing those who have the best knowledge of your customers—but who may not have coding experience—to test your app, the dev team can get valuable feedback on user experience issues. Low-code automated web testing not only expands the coverage of your mobile app testing strategy but it helps to simplify and scale business operations as well.

Making software products accessible to people with disabilities has become a top concern for software companies. Inaccessible web and mobile apps are not only a legal liability, but they can cause your business to lose billions of dollars to competitors. This number will only grow in 2022 as the calls for accessibility get louder, prompting increased investment in developing accessible web and mobile apps. Here’s how to get started with accessibility testing. 

Observability takes application performance monitoring (APM) one step further by providing continuous intelligence across your entire CI/CD pipeline. Adding observability solutions to your test suite will provide greater visibility into the health and security of your mobile applications throughout the SDLC, including in pre- and post-production. Observability solutions are yet another tool in your test arsenal to balance speed and quality while ensuring digital confidence.

The adoption of internet of things (IoT) technology and mobile-connected smart objects is gaining momentum, with IoT spending projected to reach $1.1 trillion by 2023. The sheer number of IoT devices in circulation--currently around 2 billion in the U.S. alone—and the broad range of capabilities and connections across devices will be a challenge for mobile app testers. Capturing all possible bug and error scenarios will require including different testing approaches, including security, performance, usability, and others.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of digitization on many fronts. People are used to spending hours on mobile apps every day, and their expectations for what these apps should deliver—from user experience to security to performance—are increasing. Software development teams will need to think differently and adopt more progressive methods to satisfy the competing demands for speed, quality, and security. By strengthening the quality of your mobile app testing suite based on what lies ahead for 2022, your organization can gain a competitive advantage that both retains users and grows business revenue.